Irish Sporting Lives filling the void with vital history of sportswomen

Ancestry-tracing has become quite a thing in recent enough times, spurred, of course, by all those websites that promise to make the task painless, as well as programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? which, quite often, dig up rather spectacular connections.

Who will ever forget four-time Olympic gold rowing medallist Matthew Pinsent’s face when he was told he was related to God? Not Steve Redgrave, the actual God.

And last week, RTÉ showed a repeat of the ITV episode of Our DNA Journey that featured Jamie Redknapp and Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff.

Jamie, having assumed all his ancestors came from the east end of London, learnt that his three-times grandfather was a Yorkshire miner who received a bravery medal from King George V for saving a work-mate after their mine collapsed.

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He was, understandably, emotional.

“This is your first ever medal,” Freddie noted, ruining the moment.

For most of us, though, this research can prove quite disappointing. You set out in the hope of finding a war hero, or at least a serial killer, and all you get in the end is a Donegal great grandfather who was fined in 1897 for not having his dog muzzled. That’s as revolutionary as the family got. And worse, he paid the fine.

But what you learn soon enough when you embark on these ancestor-hunting journeys is just how little information is available on the women in your family tree.

If you studied – and that word is being used very loosely here – history along the way, this is not news, it was the way of it, the lads tended to do the stuff that was recorded, like war-mongering, light bulb-inventing, bridge-building, leaving their dogs unmuzzled, and such like.

Unless you were, say, Catherine the Great, Amelia Earhart or Countess Markievicz, your story tended not to be told.

Which is why Irish Sporting Lives, published this month by the Royal Irish Academy, is a joy.

Compiled by historians and Dictionary of Irish Biography researchers Terry Clavin and Turlough O’Riordan, with a foreword by sports historian Professor Paul Rouse, it puts a heap of meat on the bone of the stories of 60 Irish sports people, offering biographical essays on them all.

Plenty of the names are more than familiar, like George Best, Alex Higgins, Jack Kyle, Jim Stynes, Kevin Heffernan, Pat Taaffe, Vincent O’Brien, Joey Dunlop and Jack Doyle, but the lesser told stories are a treat.

Like Lady Mary Heath (1896–1939), an athlete of some repute who later became a famed aviator, her story told by Lindie Naughton in her 2004 book, Lady Icarus - The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath.

Like Fay Taylour (1904–1983), the Nazi-supporting speedway racer from Birr, Co Offaly. There are at least two movies in that story alone.

Like May Hezlet (1882–1978), oft labelled ‘Ireland’s greatest woman golfer’, to which Leona might say ‘hello?’

Like Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Le Blond (1860–1934), a mountaineer at a time when the least lady-like thing you could possibly do was, well, climb mountains.

Like Mabel Cahill (1863–1905) who has, perhaps, the most remarkable of all stories, one that Mark Ryan first delved in to on tennisforum.com back in 2016, his research in to her life beyond remarkable, one Rouse (2017) and Clodagh Finn (2021) later followed up for The Examiner. Get thee to the Google and dig out those pieces, they’re brilliant.

It’s hard to know where to start with Cahill’s tale, it really is extraordinary. The gist: a native of Kilkenny, one of 13 children, she moved to the United States in the 1880s and went on to win five US Open tennis titles. She was the Serena of her day.

Later, she tried her hand at writing, but her novels were not a success, so she moved to England, where she took up singing in music halls. By then, though, she was suffering from tuberculosis and ended up destitute. Come 1904, she took refuge in a workhouse in Lancashire, dying the following year.

Cahill was buried in an unmarked grave at the Church of St Peter and St Paul in the town of Ormskirk, Lancashire, Kilkenny Tennis Club and Finn working towards righting that ignominy in recent years.

In 1976, Cahill was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, but by then she was long gone and long forgotten, lying in a grave that did not even bear her name.

When you enter Mabel Cahill’s name on the most widely used ancestry-tracing website, you’ll get a pile of information on the men in her family, but next to nothing on the women who might have inspired her to lead the most extraordinary of lives.

Projects like Irish Sporting Lives attempt to fill the void. Doff your cap.